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Chapter One
THIS had to be some horribly realistic nightmare. It couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t.
Daisy closed her eyes and pinched her arm.
When it hurt, the sick feeling in her stomach intensified, and she opened her eyes again to face the facts.
Someone really had broken into the fairground museum. Several people—and pretty drunk, too, judging by the number of smashed bottles around the gallopers and the vomit sprayed nearby. Yobs who’d thought it would be a laugh to cut off the horses’ tails and spray-paint obscene graffiti along their sides. And they’d used the cafe as a coconut shy and lobbed stones through the plate glass, wrecking it.
Daisy had always been practical and could fix almost anything, but she couldn’t fix this—at least, not fast enough. No way could she open the fairground today. It would take days to sort out this mess and make it safe for children and families again.
Who on earth would do something like this? It was completely beyond her. Why would anyone want to wreck such a beautiful piece of machinery, an important piece of heritage, just for kicks?
With shaking hands, Daisy grabbed her mobile phone and called the police to report the damage.
When she’d finished, she called her uncle. She hated having to call him on his day off—the day when she was supposed to be in charge and opening up—but this had stopped being a normal Sunday. And she wasn’t the only one who had a huge stake in the museum; Bill had given it half a lifetime.
‘Bill, it’s Daisy. I’m so sorry to ring you at this time on a Sunday morning, but…’ She swallowed hard, not knowing what to say, how to tell him such awful news.
‘Daisy, are you all right? What’s happened?’
‘Vandals must’ve got in last night. I don’t know how.’ Daisy knew beyond all doubt that she’d locked up properly the night before. ‘But there’s a lot of broken glass and they’ve damaged the gallopers.’ She bit her lip. The police are on their way. We’ll have to stay closed for at least today, probably tomorrow as well.’
This would have to happen so early in the season. As they ran the museum on a shoestring, this was going to put a major hole in their budget. It could all be fixed, but it would take time, and they’d have to pay the insurance excess, which wouldn’t be small. Not to mention the missed takings until the fairground was back in action. Disappointed tourists might be put off ever coming back to the museum, and they’d tell their friends, too, who would then shelve their own planned visit. And that would hit future takings.
Without a decent amount of visitors through the gates, there wouldn’t be money for their planned restoration programme. The ride she’d managed to rescue last autumn would have another year for rust to creep through it, another year that might mean it was too late to save it. So instead of having a working set of vintage chair-o-planes that would absolutely thrill their visitors they’d be left with a heap of useless scrap metal. All that money wasted, and she’d been the one who’d stuck her neck out and persuaded Bill to buy it in the first place. So much for proving that she could take over when Bill retired in a couple of years. She’d spent money they should’ve kept as reserves in case of situations like this.
‘The police want statements from me, obviously, as I’m the one who discovered it. But they said they’d like to talk to you as well. I’m sorry, Bill.’
‘All right, love. I’m on my way,’ Bill reassured her. ‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’
‘Thanks. I’ll put up some signs saying we’re closed today and then start ringing round the staff. See you in a bit.’ Daisy slid the phone back into her pocket and stared at the gallopers, the Victorian roundabout that her great-grandfather had built, complete with its original fairground organ. Part of her wanted to go over to each of the mutilated horses in turn and hug them, tell them that everything was going to be OK. Stupid, she knew. Apart from anything else, it might damage any evidence the yobs had left behind. And the horses were wooden, had no feelings. But she’d grown up with them, could remember riding them as a toddler, and it felt as if someone just had smashed something from her childhood and trampled on it.
She’d spent ten years of her life helping to build this place up: ten years when she’d taken a tough course in mechanical engineering, having to justify herself to her parents, to her tutors, to the other students on the course. Ten years when she’d had to persuade people that she was doing the right thing. Half the time they’d thought they knew better, and Stuart had even made her choose between the fairground and him.
Not that it had been much of an ultimatum. Any man who wanted to change her and stop her doing what she loved wasn’t the right man for her. She knew she’d made the right choice, turning him down. The right choice for both of them. He was married with small children, now, children that he regularly brought to the fairground.
Funny how he could see what she saw in it now.
But it was too late. Even if Stu hadn’t been married, she wasn’t interested any more. When her next two
